When You Die, What Happens To Your Twitter?

Think you’ll love Twitter until your last days? If you plan on tweeting until you drop, Twitter has measures in place for your loved ones.

If you do move on to the great big TweetDeck in the sky, your loved ones can ask Twitter to either make an archive of your public tweets or disable your account entirely. But not just anyone can take down your account — a loved one would have to contact Twitter with your contact info, their relationship to you, your username and a link to a written obituary. It might seem like a lot, but it will certainly keep any pranksters from deleting your account while you’re alive and kicking.

CNET notes that Facebook has a similar policy — your account can either be deleted or “memorialized,” allowing your Facebook friends to still post on your wall post-mortem. If your profile gets the memorial treatment, sensitive details like your contact information will be deleted, and nobody can ever log into your account again.

Though these policies are fairly new, as current generations grow up with social media, it will be interesting to see if (and how) people take their social media to the grave.